Service Applications in SharePoint 2010

In this post I would like to explain briefly about Service Applications which is an enhancement of a Shared service provider (SSP).

Before going to discuss about this, I would like to discuss about SSP in SharePoint 2007 and how did this Service Applications replaced SSP

Challenges with SSP in SharePoint 2007 are

1. All or nothing, example If we want to add only Search service in our Web
application without need of other services which are provided by SSP. Is it
possible in SSP? answer to this question is NO.

This means we can't add required services individually, we need to add all
services or nothing.

Service Applications overcome this challenge by providing services individually
to each web applications.

2. We can't extend the SSP that is we can't create custom SSPs by adding our own
services.

Using Service Applications we can create our own service and deploy it into farm.

3. Difficult to Share SSP with other server farms that is Cross Farms...

It is simplified in Service Applications using Service Application Proxy, which
is an instance of Service Application.

These are basic improvements of SSP introduced by Service Applications in
SharePoint 2010.